World War One in Medway

All photographs on this page are reproduced by the kind permission of the Chatham Observer.
Most of the following images when clicked take you directly to the DeCaville Index record.

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
Laurence Binyon(1869 - 1943)

HMS Aboukir

HMS Cressy

HMS Hogue

The memorial to the men of the Live Bait Squadron in The Hague, Netherlands.

On the morning of 22 September 1914 some 1,459 men drowned, of those 176 were from the Medway Towns, when their ships the HMS Cressy, Hogue and Aboukir were torpedoed and sank off the Dutch coast. The men are known as The Live Bait Squadron and following the discovery a few years ago of some of their graves in a cemetery in The Hague, Dutchman, Henk van der Linden, began a quest to find out more about the men and their descendants. FOMA Chairman, Tessa Towner, and FOMA members, have been working with Henk on this project and further information can be found on the Live Bait Squadron website.